Researcher at Center of Storm Over Vouchers

School is out on the Harvard University campus, and the atmosphere
in Paul E. Peterson's book-lined office is calm, even serene. Footsteps
echo in the corridor. Small groups of visitors saunter across the lawn
outside.

But the eye of a hurricane is supposed to be calm.

Paul E. Peterson

Position: Henry Lee Shattuck
professor of government and director, Program on
Educational Policy and Governance, Harvard University,
Cambridge, Mass.

Age: 57

Current residence: Wellesley,
Mass.

Education: Concordia College,
Moorhead, Minn., B.A., 1962; University of Chicago, M.A. in
political science, 1964, and Ph.D. in political science,
1967.

Other career posts: Director of
governmental studies for the Brookings Institution,
Washington, 1983-87; professor of political science and
education, University of Chicago, 1967-83.

Personal: Married to Carol
Peterson. Three children, ages 24 to 27.

And if any scholar is at the center of a political storm these days,
it is this political science professor with the dry Minnesota wit.
Wherever debate roils over statistics from school choice programs, Mr.
Peterson is usually at the heart of it.

In Milwaukee, he engaged in a verbal slugfest over the state-funded
voucher experiment with the researcher appointed to evaluate the
program. In Cleveland, he was at it again last year, attacking the
official evaluation of the state-financed choice program there.

In Dayton, Ohio, New York City, San Antonio, and the District of
Columbia, architects of privately backed choice plans have engaged Mr.
Peterson to evaluate their efforts.

And so far, wherever he has gone, he and his colleagues have come to
the same conclusion: Private school choice works. Students in such
programs, his studies have found, fare better academically than
students who attend public schools to which they are assigned.

His findings have endeared him to voucher advocates hungry for the
credibility that his name and his university affiliation bring.

But some opponents of such programs, as well as more
independent-minded education researchers, suggest that Mr. Peterson
lets his enthusiasm for vouchers creep into his work.

"There's no question that he's a passionate advocate for vouchers,"
said Henry M. Levin, a Stanford University professor of education and
economics who sits with Mr. Peterson on a committee advising the
evaluation of the Cleveland program. "And that certainly dominates his
perspective on these evaluations."

'Highest Repute'

Critics have also attacked Mr. Peterson's penchant for bypassing
scholarly journals to make his case in newspaper editorials, and the
conservative funding sources behind some of his research.

His supporters, however, say he is being demonized.

"It's sort of painful to see Paul taking potshots from people who
question his integrity and think of him as a kind of huckster, when
Paul is a scholar held in the highest repute by political scientists,"
said Terry M. Moe, the Stanford scholar whose 1989 book, Politics,
Markets, and America's Schools, written with John E. Chubb, helped
propel the current movement for private school choice.

Mr. Peterson's resume includes a long list of scholarly
achievements, and his 1981 book about urban politics, City
Limits, was named the best book of the year by the American
Political Science Association.

The 57-year-old researcher rejects the notion that he is anything
but a serious academic. If the criticism is sharp, Mr. Peterson says,
it's because the stakes are high: "When people address important
topics, they are inevitably criticized."

In Mr. Peterson's case, the important topic is vouchers, one of the
most politically charged issues in education. And many researchers
worry that outside pressures are interfering with scholarship.

"Even when he has limited data, he's always squeezing out whatever
data he can to arrive at a predetermined answer," contended Bruce
Fuller, a researcher from the University of California, Berkeley, who
has written critically of voucher plans.

Personal Exchange

Mr. Peterson says he was more of a skeptic than an advocate when he
first looked at statistics coming out of Milwaukee, where a pioneering
voucher initiative created by the Wisconsin legislature to serve poor
children was launched in 1990.

The official, state-commissioned study, conducted by John F. Witte,
an education professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, compared
students in the choice program with regular Milwaukee public school
students. Though parents in the program gave it high marks, Mr. Witte
found that students using the vouchers to attend private schools did no
better on tests than their public-sector peers did.

But when Mr. Peterson looked at the study's design, he saw what he
believed was a better control group: students who by the luck of the
draw did not get into the private schools of their choice and, as a
result, remained in public schools. Parents of those students, he
surmised, would be just as motivated for their children to succeed.

But when he tried to do that analysis, Mr. Witte would not
immediately share the data, citing state-imposed restrictions on
access, privacy considerations, and other concerns.

That led to a bitter feud between the two men that endures.

"It obviously went well beyond an academic exchange," Mr. Witte said
recently. "He and several other voucher supporters have attacked me
personally and constantly misrepresented my appointment as evaluator of
the Milwaukee program and my objectivity. And I am afraid that led me
to act a bit like them."

Supporters of Mr. Peterson say the personalized tone was out of
character for him.

"Paul doesn't have a history of this sort of thing," Mr. Moe said,
"and I don't think Witte does either."

When Mr. Peterson and Harvard colleagues Jay P. Greene and Jiangtao
Du finally got a chance to analyze the data in 1995, they reached the
opposite conclusion from the one they expected. They found that, after
three and four years, the voucher students outperformed their public
school counterparts in reading and mathematics.

But those findings were questioned, too, by researchers who pointed
out the high attrition rates at the private schools. Were the scores
higher because the weaker students were leaving the program?1

In an attempt to answer such criticisms, Mr. Peterson and his
colleagues later revisited the data to explore the question of whether
student attrition had skewed the scores. The answer, they determined,
was no.

What is more, the positive findings from Milwaukee were later echoed
by a Princeton University researcher who conducted her own
analysis.

Critiques in Cleveland

Last year, Mr. Peterson raised eyebrows again, this time in
Cleveland, the site of the first state-funded voucher program to
include religious schools.

He and Mr. Greene, now an assistant professor at the University of
Texas at Austin, released data showing once again that students in the
private schools had an academic edge over those in the public
schools.

There were a couple of catches, though. The scores came from only
two of the 55 schools involved in the program, although those schools
enrolled 15 percent of all the voucher students.

And, rather than being retested a full year later, students tested
in the fall were tested again in the spring--a practice some
researchers found questionable.3 Mr. Peterson has since accounted for
that difference, and still found the private school students holding a
slight edge.

Paul T. Hill, a University of Washington professor and a Peterson
supporter, says Mr. Peterson's initial work on the Cleveland program
"is not a persuasive study."

But Mr. Hill, who has written in support of school choice, remains a
proponent of the Harvard scholar's work. "We do now have an
advocacy-oriented debate, and people on the negative side are going to
present their case any way they can," he said. "I think Paul is in a
position where he has to do the same thing or let the negative
information out there go unchallenged."

Mr. Peterson acknowledges that the demand for information on
vouchers is high. "Some data's better than no data at all," he said.
"And that was the only data available on Cleveland for people who
wanted to know whether it had been working."

The debate in Cleveland flared up again earlier this year with the
release of the official first-year evaluation of the program. It found
no academic differences between the 3rd graders in the program and
their counterparts in the city's public schools.

Mr. Peterson, part of a group of researchers advising the state
evaluators, argued that those findings were suspect, noting among other
criticisms that the study included scores for only 94 students.

Kim Metcalfe, the Indiana University evaluator who conducted that
study, defended the results, but Mr. Peterson, unconvinced, took his
argument to newspaper editorial pages and to state policymakers.

Those tactics irk some researchers, who contend that such debates
are better conducted in research journals or at conferences.

But, said Mr. Peterson's research partner Mr. Greene, "it's
important to continue to release information without going through a
lengthy review process when you're addressing real political issues
that occur in real time."

Eyeing N.Y.C.

Mr. Fuller of UC-Berkeley takes Mr. Peterson to task for financing
his evaluations with grants from conservative supporters of voucher
experiments, such as the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation and the
John M. Olin Foundation.

"That's like the tobacco companies sponsoring studies on the effects
of smoking," Mr. Fuller said.

Mr. Peterson says his funding sources do not influence the outcomes
of his studies. He admits, though, that the Milwaukee and Cleveland
studies were not perfect. Yet they are better, he argues, than the
state-sponsored evaluations.

Mr. Peterson's recent research has bolstered his belief that school
choice works, suggesting that "it's having a choice that makes the
difference rather than which schools students go to."

He is hoping that an evaluation under way in New York City may
silence his critics for good. In that city, more than 20,000 applicants
competed in a lottery last year for 1,300 privately financed,
three-year scholarships to about 215 private schools.

That setup, Mr. Peterson and his colleagues believe, gives them a
chance to do their long-hoped-for randomized experiment, in which
enough schools and enough students will be involved to overcome the
problems with the earlier research. The first results are due out this
fall.

If he is dogged in his pursuit of the definitive voucher study, Mr.
Peterson says, it is because the need for drastic action is so
pressing. "I've definitely come to the conclusion that big-city school
systems are in trouble and that something needs to be done," he said.
"Choice is an option out there that needs to be investigated openly,
fully, and fairly."

Vol. 17, Issue 43, Pages 1, 16-17

Published in Print: August 5, 1998, as Researcher at Center of Storm Over Vouchers

School Choice: The Cultural Logic of Families, the Political
Rationality of Institutions, is a compilation of research from nine
different reports on school choice, including an introduction and
conclusion by Harvard professors Richard Elmore, Gary Orfield, and
Bruce Fuller. In "Response
to a Harvard Study on School Choice: Is It a Study at All?" read
the reactions of several education experts to a draft of the report.
From the Pioneer
Institute, November 1995.

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